2 Processual and system approaches

  
Systems analysis has been the vehicle for the application of models emphasizing ecology and economy, based on predicable law-like relationships.
Wobst: the adaptive advantage, ‘Learned behavior and symbolizing ability greatly increase the capacity of human operators to interact with their environment through medium of artifact. This capacity …. Improves their ability to harness and process energy and matter’. [such work concentrates on material functions and reduces symbolic behavior to utility and adaptation.]
Hodder: material boundaries are more marked where there is increased negative reciprocity between groups. 
Flannery and Marcus: their concern is with the way ritual regulates the relationship between people and environment. Human ecosystems involve the exchange of matter, energy, and information.
It is impossible to discuss function to the exclusion of the ideational realm, for 3 reasons:
(1) The notion of ‘function’ assumes some ‘end’, or several ‘ends’ which are in some way ranked in order of importance. (P26)
(2) Before we can talk of the functions of an object, we normally produce categories of objects, in producing these categories, the archaeologists automatically embed them with meaning. In so far as they are always in at least partial conformity to our current linguistic and perceptual codes, categorization schemes inevitably carry with them a contemporary and contingent sense of order.  (P26) our own systems of meaning intervene because we still select the ‘appropriate’ variables and statistical algorithms(算法). 
(3)  The hypothesis concerning function is always based on an assumption about the meaning of an object. Function and meaning are inextricably(难分地) linked.
(P30) Material objects derive their functional meanings largely from such factories as weight, hardness, friability(易碎性), distribution and ease of access. The objects which are used for particular tasks depend on these factors as well as on technological and ecological processes and structures. Much material culture meaning comes about pragmatically through use and experience, always embedded within and helping to constitute the structured systems of signs. Artifacts embody the dialectic(辩证的) between the material and the ideal. 
Covering law 是新考古学或过程考古学所要找寻的普遍法则
(P31) One aspect of the systemic approach to ideology is that individuals appear to be easily fooled. They are easily duped(上当) by the dominant ideology, and they easily accept the legitimation of control. 
It is perhaps surprising that, although the whole of the New Archaeology or processual archaeology was based on the rejection of normative archaeology, the systemic covering law approach is itself normative, in the sense that the beliefs and rituals, the meaning of style, are all rules shared by members of social communities. 【指出过程考古学或新考古学自身的矛盾性】 
Wobst: Style allows members of a group to evaluate how closely a given individual is subscribing to the behavioral norms of the group. 风格如何使社会成员能够评估特定的个人行为和群体行为规范的舒密程度。【风格分析的重要性】p31
(P33) Behavioral archaeologists ‘seek to explain variability and change in human behavior by emphasizing the study of relationships between people and their artifacts’. By a careful attention to the relational and spatial context of artifacts and an ambitious commitment to the entire range of human activities, including communication, ritual and religion. ----- systemic and materialist approaches documented thus falls short of recognizing the importance of meaning, history and the active potential of material culture. Material culture is meaningfully constituted.
(P34)  Schiffer defined ‘culture’ as learned behavior: that which is the object of cultural transmission. In practice, behaviorists occasionally do conceive of culture as a causal agent. 
(P35) symbolic meaning, as well as later argue, imbues every artifacts and every activity. 
Renfrew developed a cognitive archaeology. Renfrew sets out to examine the ways in which symbols were used, rather than search for the meaning or metaphysics of past symbolic systems. As much as Renfrew seeks to avoid intuitive leaps towards meaning, ascertaining the function of symbols necessarily involves assumptions about their meanings. ----- that will end towards that the function of symbols is always produced within a matrix of cultural meanings. (p36)
Renfrew: representation is reserved only for communicating values. 但是作者认为 in some societies, art is not about communication of an ethos; social values may be reinforced through other media. 并且Renfrew 没有解释 why certain symbolic concepts endure for millennia while other concepts or ideas fail even to become ‘cognitive constellations’ ( p37 )
Perhaps the fundamental difficulty underlying Renfrew’s cognitive archaeology is his reaffirmation of old dichotomies (二分法), such as function/ symbol, etic/ emic and subject/ object. Ultimately such dichotomous thinking pervades not just Renfrew’s ideas on what we can and cannot know about the past, but also his ideas on how we can claim to know what we do. (p37)
(p38) 作者认为Renfrew有着自身的主客观矛盾性，例如在宗教研究上，Renfrew’s approach to the study of religion, in which he suggests that investigation will be advanced by his own definition of religion, which is claimed to have nearly universal correlates. Elsewhere, Renfrew claims that his own personal experience does not differ radically from that of other human. ------- latent subjectivity (Chapter 9 )
Renfrew: ‘mind’ is the formulated concepts and the shared ways of thoughts which, within any specific cultural matrix, are the common inheritance of all its citizens as participants. (p38)
(p39)作者认为这种说法有 internal contradiction原因：(1) ‘we’ in the present and ‘they’ in the past have our own cultural matrices. (2) there is a postulated a universal method and coherent theory which relates ways of thought to material objects. How can my coherent theory and explicit methodology about the relationship between the material and the ideal be applied to another culture with its own cognitive processes and cognitive phylogeny发展史?
(p39) It is no longer possible to have a universal natural science theory and method which will allow secure inference and prediction from one historical context to another. Inferential procedures followed routinely by archaeologists include reconstructing past cultural matrices ‘from the inside’. 
Evolutionary archaeology 
(p41) Kohn 和Mithen 认为手斧是性选择的产物，elaborately crafted to demonstrate the skill of the knapper砸碎, symmetrical对称 because symmetricality is attractive, unwieldy and unused because they function purely as objects of social display. 【作者认为： there is no good explanation as to why handaxes are even tied to genes. The natural science origins of neo-evolutionary archaeology constrain its ability to move beyond measurement and prediction in discussing meaning, agency and history.】
作者认为：natural sciences and the covering law inferential procedures most commonly attributed to the natural sciences 并不能帮助我们解释为什么有些物质文化和权力等意识形态相关的领域联系起来。
Conclusion:
(p42) There is a certainly a sense in which systems thinking is contextual. The aim is to examine the way in which a particular set of components is related into a whole. It might be thought that the method, or way of thinking, does not involve any universal laws.
(p43) Renfrew: system theory provides a method for bringing the social and the ideational into the domain of feasible study, because systematic links between the material world and these less visible aspects of life could be predicted. For example, links have been demonstrated between subsistence categories and burial practices (Binford 1971).
Systems and processual theories may have bridged the credibility gap in relation to archaeological study of the ideational realm, but we have tried to show that they have not taken us very much farther along the road. The approaches are not able to account for the great richness, variability and specificity of cultural production, and agents and their shared thoughts are passive by-products of the ‘system’. Human activity is timeless, the product of systemic inter-relationships rather than being historically derived. Above all, the processual approaches have led to an internally self-contradictory epistemology.